- "According to the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report, the wild populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have shrunk, on average, by 60% since the first Earth Day (50 years earlier)."
- "A study published last fall found that there are now some 3 billion fewer birds in North America than there were 50 years ago, a decline of nearly 30%...."
Fifty years ago, I was moving to California. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Somehow, we humans think of ourselves as the only life that matters. "To feed, house, and provide energy for our own growing population," NatGeo reported, "we've appropriated ever more of the world's resources for ourselves. People have significantly altered something like 3/4 of the ice-free land on earth. More than 85% of the world's wetland area has been lost."
***
It gets worse.
Yet The New Republic reports that Lee Zeldin "has cut billions of dollars from climate grants the Biden administration had awarded, eviscerated pollution rules and enforcement capacity, and perhaps most significantly, wiped out the legal basis of much climate regulation...." Yet the 2009 endangerment finding," says the report... "stipulates that greenhouse gases can be regulated because they imperil human life and health."
And...contrary to common thinking, it's not the economy, stupid! The Guardian has reported, "The regulations slated for repeal, affecting coal plants, cars, trucks and other sources of pollution, had been set to deliver at least $254bn in economic benefits annually via lowered healthcare costs and fewer sick days, among other improvements. By contrast, the cost of complying with the regulations is around $40bn a year."
"The rollback of these critical public health interventions will increase heart attacks, hospitalizations, cognitive impairment, respiratory disease, and healthcare costs," said Gaurab Basu, an assistant professor of medicine climate expert at Harvard University. "It will leave our children facing an increasingly unstable planet Earth."
***
It seems that a quarter-century after the Bush Greenwatch report, nothing has changed. In May of this year, the Guardian reported that "The climate crisis should be declared a global "public health emergency of international concern."
Advised by theWorld Health Organization , the report warned that "millions more people will die unnecessarily." "Far from being a fading priority or fake news, climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to health, economic, food, water, environmental, personal, community and national security."
###
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
